What, where, when?
📅 October 31st, 2025 | 12:00 – 18:00
📍 Auditorium, O2 building, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
🎟️ Free, register here (before 1st Oct with a talk title; 15th Oct regular): forms.office.com/e/qCrRcXhsyA

We’ll explore these questions (and more!) together at the AIMMS Symposium “Modeling metabolism: successes, challenges, and prospects”

With talks by:
✨ Djordje Bajić (TUD)
✨ Meike Wortel (UvA)
✨ Ursula Kummer (Uni Heidelberg)
✨ María Suárez Diez (WUR)
🔷 selected early-career researcher talks.

Metabolic modeling has advanced over decades, built on the dedication and behind-the-scenes work of countless researchers. But some big questions remain:

💡 What are the biggest challenges ahead?
🚀 What is the next frontier in modeling metabolism?

🔬 Recent breakthroughs in understanding metabolism, and applying this knowledge, have only been possible thanks to the creative blending of multiple disciplines. Among them, mathematical modeling has become a cornerstone for many successful interdisciplinary studies in the life sciences.

Embracing computational models in their research feels like crossing the Rubicon for many people, although it should not be so. That was my red thread while overseeing the writing of this manuscript. Modeling is an essential ingredient for the next grand advance(s) of the 21st century biology!

This text (in another format) will become a chapter in the Euglenozoa book of the Methods in Molecular Biology series soon (details TBD). The copyediting and other formalities are pending; in the meantime, I am very happy to share the manuscript version of the chapter.

We (me and Jurgen Haanstra from the Vrije Universiteit, and colleagues from Uni Sao Paulo in Brazil) spelt some wisdom out on how experimental data becomes some zeros and ones in genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) - focusing on organisms that exhibit metabolically distinct life stages.